


White Noise

by Fawx



Category: Homestuck
Genre: College AU, M/M, Post Sburb/Sgrub, humans on 'alternia', of sorts, trolls on 'earth', which is which it is a complete mystery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-09
Updated: 2014-05-05
Packaged: 2017-12-18 05:05:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/875922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fawx/pseuds/Fawx
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dave had gone with the stronger of his memories, and for his absence, John had faded from Best Friend to just a friend. After endgame things had never quite gone back to the way they had been.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. (Static)

White Noise

 

_One (Static)_

 

‘ _I long to walk with some old lover’s ghost_

_Who died before the god of Love was born’_

-John Donne, Love’s Dietie

 

SEPTEMBER

\--

John emerged from the 17th street station platform with little concession to the rain; it poured from a slate-grey sky, boiling steadily on the Northeastern horizon. He had an umbrella, and his coat was waterproof, but staying out from under the touch of an approaching storm had never really felt right to him.  

It was late afternoon; rain had been a threat since early morning but only now was it making good on all the bluster. Grey buildings and grey streets and brief stretches of green lawns were drenched by the time he made it from the station to campus, by then so was he, for the most part. He got a few looks from passing classmates, grinned at them from behind dripping hair and didn’t fault them for huddling alone or in couples under flimsy umbrellas, but he also didn’t stop a gust from blowing away the protection just briefly enough for the rain to get in. A little water never hurt anybody.

In a few weeks a downpour like this would be sleet instead, or snow if they were unlucky. But there was still the taste of summer in the air now so John loitered outside instead of ducking into the Climate Sciences building, watching the clouds roll like a wet bruise across the sky.

He could be up there, if he wanted. If he was careful he could make it to the roof and then it was just a matter of flying fast enough and high enough, and then -

His phone buzzed a little staccato in his pocket; he paused under the overhang barely sheltering the front doors, thumbing through the messages on his phone.  A check-in from Mr. Crocker, the usual commentary from Rose or Jade, occasional taunts from Vriska. Chums pestering him left and right, but what caught him now was the two-message notification in red.

 

TG: stayed home please bring juice when youve got a chance

TG: and i swear to god one mention of howie and i will in fact fucking kill you we grew out of that shit ten years ago

 

John checked the clock in the upper corner of his phone against the message time; Dave had probably cut all his morning classes.  He frowned; it wasn’t uncommon for Dave to skip a class or three, but his absences had been more uncomfortably frequent, his bad days more noticeable. John tapped out a reply and pocketed his phone. He could wait, drip-dry in class and dream of flying up above the slipstreams they would study, or he could catch the next cross-town bus to Dave’s apartment. He turned on his heel immediately and squelched through the downpour to the closest bus stop.

 

\--

 

The midtown high rise apartments pushed a cement salute against the sky, near black by the time John’s bus came to a watery halt just down the street. He ducked through the rain to the corner store just adjacent to the bus stop, snatched up juice and various packaged snacks, and then slipped out again to the alley that stretched alongside the apartment's main building.

The apartments had a perfectly serviceable front door, and the lobby if he remembered correctly even looked relatively clean and friendly. It was just that, considering it was a Strider abode, the conventional way of getting around never really turned out to be the easiest way to get anywhere. The one time John had tried to be lazy and use the elevator, he’d ended up stuck in the basement parking garage for two hours under the dim emergency light while tinny pop music filtered through the speaker system and a vague feeling that he’d brought it upon himself crept through his subconscious.

Instead he’d found a better way, a little bit of a guilty cheat. There was a fire escape on the building directly the neighbor to Dave’s, and from the roof all it took was a well-placed leap (or, in John’s case, a careless jump and the back of the wind at his call) and any intrepid visitor could get to the roof access stairwell and take the dark plunge down to the penthouse apartment.  This, despite the name, wasn’t on the top floor. Instead it was somewhere around the middle of the building, and while the roof access was technically the most direct route, new visitors needed a map and occasionally grappling hooks to get there.  Not that it was a problem for John, it was rare he actually took the stairs instead of floating down the middle of the chaos to the right door - which, true to form, was almost impossible to find - that opened into the Strider apartment. It was never locked, though a key suspended by a string of paper clips hung from a hook next to the door. John had tried the key on the lock out of curiosity once, it hadn’t even fit.

He shouldered open the door, mindful of the ever present threat of falling plush, and kicked off his shoes. They squeaked morosely against the linoleum foyer, and the sound drew an annoyed grunt from somewhere further inside. He shrugged out of his coat and hung it over the back of a chair that had never been sat on but held at least six months worth of junk mail, and slid into the living room.

There were no lights on, but from the door he could see the plasma glow of the big screen TV that dominated the living room. On the TV a game was paused and muted, the same terrible Mad Snacks Yo game Dave had failed to beat since before Sburb.  All he could hear was the constant, claustrophobic buzz of whining electronics, the ticking of the clock on the wall, and the steady drumming of rain against the windows. Over a field of cords, discarded puppets, and the odd cheap replica sword there was the old and body-wrecked futon, folded half-broken to bed mode, supported by cinder blocks and the hilt of a dagger that looked like something out of a movie. On the futon, Dave was stretched out prone, head turned towards the TV. John padded over and knelt at the head of the futon, setting the wet bag of snacks on the floor next to him.

“You look totally shitwrecked,” he stated, looking Dave over. It was tradition more than a viable observation; Dave usually looked just fine regardless of health. His image and his pride never allowed for him to look anything other than a ten, so as dictated by law and circumstance, John told him the exact opposite. This, like many sustainable lies, was what kept their friendship stable, or so John liked to tell himself. It was easier than admitting he’d get too painfully and obviously flustered if he said anything about how _good_ Dave looked, all the time. “Sick?”

“No,” Dave grumbled, turning his face so his mouth just cleared the pillow. He was doing a good impression of a guy who wanted to slowly smother himself out of his misery.  John tilted his head and could see a dark smear along the pillowcase, and frowned. Nosebleeds were a bad sign on a good day; a worrisome one on bad days, and this was definitely a bad day.

“You sure?” he asked, nodding to the smear. Dave grimaced.

“Well, it ain’t the fuckin’ flu.”

John reached into the grocery bag and pulled out the juice, popping open the cap and holding the bottle out for Dave to take. Dave pushed himself up with a belabored grunt to take a swig. John couldn’t see his eyes for the shades, but he knew the look he was getting was still overly suspicious. He grimaced, guilty of a quick mental somersault that kept him from making the latest in years of awful, no-good Little Monsters jokes at Dave’s expense. Some things are harder to grow out of than others.

“I didn’t _say_ anything,” he protested. Dave handed the bottle back.

“You don’t have to,” Dave croaked, lying back down. “I know you’re thinking it.”

“Never crossed my mind,” John lied, twisting the cap back on. “Ice pack?”

“Yeah.” Dave’s face was in the pillow again; at least if his nose started bleeding the mess would be sopped up immediately.

John went to the bathroom and fished an ice pack out of the mini fridge behind the shower. When he returned, Dave was fumbling blindly through the snack bag, mumbling at him from the pillow.

“What?”

“I said,” Dave came up for air, lifting a bag of Doritos up to his face to check the flavor, “if your mind wasn’t trained in the most religiously fawning way on Howie getting his horrible monster dick in my juice, what _were_ you thinking about?”

John stepped over a river of cords into the kitchen to find paper towels to wrap the pack with. “Oh, I was...” he groped for a topic, settled on something relatively safe, “wondering why the hell you guys built your penthouse in the middle of the building instead of the top floor.” He found an unopened economy pack of paper towels in a lower cupboard and proceeded to rip into it.

"Uh, because that's the most predictable thing of all the things." Dave waved a hand over his head in a fleeting, dismissive gesture.

"But you built an Escher-esque number of staircases leading to the top floor."

"Yeah."

"Why though."

"Why the fuck not is the real question."

"Why don't you live in the top three floors if you own them?" The double-wrapped plastic on the paper towels finally gave way, from which John freed a roll. He tried to shove the rest back into the cupboard, but something in there had shifted, so he hunted for another. “Half the floors in this place aren’t even apartments, just stairs and doors leading nowhere.”

"Egbert, can we do the 'explain the obvious to the monkey faced buffoon' when my head doesn't feel like it's about to. Y'know. _Implode_."

"Oh yeah. _I'm_ the monkey faced buffoon,” John muttered, searching fruitlessly for an empty shelf. He settled for the top of the fridge, clearing a handful of smuppets with distractingly creepy stitched-on smiles and depositing them on a pile with their cousins.

"Glad you're feeling ready to own up to that."

John snorted, grabbed the paper towels, juggling them and the now-damp ice pack as he navigated his way back to the futon. He kicked the end of the futon just under Dave’s head."Yeah, you know, _some_ people in this room still have full motor function."

Dave grunted at him. "Don't."

"And could hypothetically punch you."

"Yeah, don't."

"In the head."

"John.”

"Repeatedly."

"C'mon, Egbert, don't be a tool, admitting you're dumb as a brick and uglier than a zookeeper is the first step."

"To what?"

"Accepting your life's true purpose as my buttslave. Obviously."

"...I'm just going to go ahead and punch you," John said, making no move to do so. Dave made a noise like a high-pitched whine into his pillow; John kicked the futon again. The dagger-hilt at the other end wobbled dangerously. Dave’s whining continued in a long, irritating warble. “God, you’re such a child. I won’t punch you, but tell me why the fugue.”

The whine stopped. John squeezed the pack so it was a little more malleable and a little less damp, and began to wrap it.

“Broke up with TZ again,” Dave muttered, after a long silence. John finished wrapping the ice pack and leaned over to set it on the back of Dave’s neck, then knelt at the head of the futon. The confession didn’t surprise him; Dave and Terezi had been going back and forth since endgame. They broke up for all kinds of reasons: because Dave had forgotten more about their time in the game than he remembered, because his understanding of quadrants was still unsatisfactory, because she didn’t understand why every date didn’t have to end in sex, violence, or both, because of time, because of life, because it was just too weird to try to slog through a three-year amnesia. John didn’t ask why, he just stayed close by and picked up the pieces when Karkat wasn’t on Best Bro duty, which was rare.

Hell, it was rare for Dave to go to him first at all. After everything was said and done, Karkat had smoothly taken up the mantle of Best Friend that John had so reluctantly abandoned, along with his chance to jump from ship to meteor. John hadn’t even been given the chance to protest; Karkat simply stepped in and took over without a word. Dave had gone with the stronger of his memories, and for his absence, John had faded from Best Friend to just a friend, and after endgame things had never... quite gone back to the way they had been.

Sometimes, thinking about it, the cool epiphany of what it meant to really _hate_ someone would slink along the back of his thoughts, even though he knew logically it was just jealousy. Other times, it merely hurt. He was at no want for friends; hell, he technically had a pantheon of friends. But there was falling out and simply being forgotten, and the latter put little cracks and fissures in the shellac of Everything Is All Right Now so messily poured over his and every other heart that woke up the cool April morning four years ago and remembered skies full of fire.

John couldn’t deny Karkat his role, or _say_ that he felt any real jealousy over Dave relying on him so much. Saying anything about it was out of the question, and petty. They were still _friends,_ John still had Bro Rights and could pop over whenever he felt, and more often than not Dave’s good days found them together, though rarely alone. In the weirdly rational, integrated universe they’d built for themselves, they’d made sure to stay close, building a city out of the fractured memories of lost universes on continents that resembled nothing like what Earth or Alternia had held, but it didn’t matter, so long as they were all close. But even that closeness didn’t ease the lingering awareness that, even though they’d won the game, the victory hadn’t exactly been stellar. All they could do was try and pick up the pieces and pretend that they knew what they were doing with their lives.

John turned so his back was against the futon, leaning against it until it creaked, then settled with his weight. He’d never be able to sit on the thing, not without the kind of balancing act that would make a career acrobat cry tears of shame. It was another incongruous weirdness about the Strider household: they owned the entire building, but only occupied about three storey’s worth. They had more money than probably literal God, but instead of buying real furniture they went dumpster-diving and made do with milk crates and cement blocks. Nothing was cast out of the Strider home until it was well past broken, and even then a pervasive sense remained of ‘we can fix it.’ Which was probably why Dave kept going back to the same relationship over and over, trying to patch over the cracks and fix what had broken. It never worked for long; in the end, the broken things broke worse, and the fallout was harder, the bad days more frequent, and what qualified as bad had turned from a few symptoms of endgame trauma to a soup of nearly unidentifiable _badness_ that got harder to navigate the longer time went by.

It was hard to deal. Harder for Dave than probably anyone else, barring the Megido sisters, but they dealt with their issues their way. John didn’t push; Dave came to him on the bad days at his discretion. All he could do was be ready, and at least marginally helpful.

John put his hand up over the futon, adjusting the ice pack, then letting his hand rest in Dave’s hair. The rain drumming up against the windows intensified in a gust, and then settled back into a monotone. The TV flickered in response, the screen dimming and then brightening, reflecting the anemic blue glow against scattered game cases and the curve of a glass eye winking at him from the hollow of a cinderblock supporting one of the legs of the kitchen table.

He didn’t jump. For the most part he’d grown out of jumping or twitching back whenever he caught sight of Lil’ Cal’s dead, empty stare, but he wasn’t sure he’d ever grow out of being mildly unsettled by it. The open malevolence was gone now, sapped away after endgame to just a little shadow of childhood fear, but he never really understood why the hell Dirk had decided to keep the thing around. He didn’t know the specifics, just a few brief and unhappy words about it from Jane or the slightly hysterical I’m-trying-too-hard-to-make-this-sound-funny anecdotes from Roxy, but it was clear things like Cal were bad news.

Which was dumb; it was just a puppet. Just a creepy, stupid puppet.

Dave nudged him with a finger and that time he _did_ jump, just a little.

“Juice,” Dave croaked at him. John took his hand away to uncap the bottle and offer it up. Dave pushed himself up on his elbow to drink, and as he did a slow drip of blood slid from his nose over the curve of his lip. John watched it descend, black in the dim light, and reached up to wipe it away once Dave had finished drinking. Jesus, he was pitiful, strong as a lava flow on his good days and reduced to shit-tier pain and discomfort on the bad days, caught between the constantly readjusting time stream of an only moderately stable new universe and the physical memory that he shouldn’t even be _alive._

He knew Dave was watching him, from behind the shades. If he looked very closely and carefully he’d be able to see Dave’s eyes grow narrow and thoughtful like they got the very few times he’d slipped and been more affectionate than strictly necessary. His hand stopped, fingers curled down around Dave’s jaw, thumb smearing the blood away from his lip in a wet, dark curve. John dropped his hand and flushed with guilt, starting to rise, maybe abscond to the kitchen for more paper towels or just let himself out now instead of acting like more of an ass than usual.

“Here,” he muttered instead, turning to kneel again, taking the bottle back, lifting the ice pack from Dave’s neck to tear a corner of damp paper off. He wiped the blood away mechanically, wadded up the paper and tossed it away like it offended him, then turned to resume his sit, back against the wobbling futon and eyes trained on nothing. Dave was still _watching_ him, propped up on his elbows, head tilted just slightly askance. Lightning cracked outside - the TV flared, scattering light across the mirror-finish of Dave’s shades and the scratched curve of John’s glasses. A low purr of thunder followed the light, rattling the windows, drowning the apartment’s constant electric hum so that there was a brief sensation of false silence.

When the thunder died and the hum returned, Dave settled back down on his pillow, arms crossed underneath it, this time with his head facing John. A few seconds of awkward uncertainty stretched into long minutes of mutual silence. John’s eyes started to ache from the dim glow of the TV, and in his head phantom ideas of what Dave was thinking, what expression he might actually see if ever Dave took off his shades, swam up against the blue glow. He fidgeted, fumbling with the damp cuffs of his jeans and not looking anywhere he might catch Dave’s reflection.

He caught sight of Lil’ Cal again. The puppet’s blank eyes stared out at him from its hidey-hole under the table. How did it even _get_ there? God he couldn’t fucking stand the damn thing, it was just another stupid artifact, a reminder that they’d lost _so much_ for the sake of playing a simple game, that things were never really going to be ‘all right.’ It just lay there, staring with its dead stupid eyes reflecting the glow off the TV, its battered, badly patched body folded up in its little cement hole like an eel in a cave.

“I should go,” he said finally, breaking off from the puppet’s stare. Dave grunted something that sounded like an affirmative, but when he moved to stand, a tug at the neck of his shirt held him up.

“Thanks for coming over,” Dave mumbled,  and just beyond the rim of his shades John could - just barely - see his eyes, and the indescribable scrutiny Dave pinned him with turned his knees to jelly.

He balked. He almost sat back down. But the uneasy buzz from that stupid doll and the knowledge that even if he _did_ stay any longer it would be more unbearable silence, waiting for someone to come home and take over, for Dave to call over Karkat and then John would have an even worse time of dealing than before. He could stay, sit under to spooky gaze of a bunch of lifeless puppets and feel smaller and smaller as the minutes went by, more and more stupid and unnecessary.

John realized suddenly that it wasn’t Lil’ Cal that had spooked him; just his own stupid, anxious certainty that he was going to end up making a complete ass out of himself. But instead of swallowing his nerves and settling back, he ducked out of Dave’s meager grip, patted him awkwardly on the shoulder, and shuffled to his wet shoes and coat with a muttered “you’re welcome.”

 

\--

 

He caught the door before it slammed behind him, eased it shut and leaned against the frame. His head still felt muzzy, like the murky plasma-colored darkness of the apartment had followed him into the stairwell. Even though it was much darker in here; the stairs were lit only intermittently, with hanging bulbs or lights on brief timers, he felt like he could see better. The oppressive silence of being a room with Dave when he wasn’t being talkative was far worse than the open silence of an empty, labyrinthine stairwell.

He started down into the dark. There was no point in trying the roof exit; only Dirk and Dave knew how to get the door open from the inside. Besides, he hardly needed to worry about falling.

The dark here was a comfort; no electric glow, no distant humming, just the hollow sound of his sneakers on the stairs and the intermittent buzz of the overhead bulbs as he passed into their range. He liked the dark, really, liked how it reminded him of the Land of Wind and Shade. There was a kind of comfort in slipping into a shadow and letting the world forget he was there, which he’d been getting better and better at doing the more time went by.

He couldn’t turn into wind any longer; there simply wasn’t enough power left in him to do it, not in the rational, fragmented world they’d built. But sometimes, if he lingered in the dark long enough, his skin didn’t resolve back quite as quickly as it should once he walked into the light. It wasn’t anything substantial, nothing that anyone else would really be able to notice if he didn’t point it out, but he _didn’t_  point it out. He supposed it was a holdover power, something to do with his Land or his Denizen, maybe a little bit of God-Tier specialness he hadn’t bothered with because being a hurricane had been so much cooler, while it lasted.

He was getting good at it, though. At vanishing, at fading out. He was better at stepping back than anyone he knew. He could go silent for days and hear nothing about it, at least not where it counted. Jade expected it; she was used to him flitting away to fuckoff nowhere. Rose had long since given up commenting on his more frequent disappearances, though he remembered her being worried, back at the start, when their world was still new and they were all more than a little afraid of being in it.  He’d told her it was nothing; he just missed the dark. Meenah gave him shit about it, when he’d bothered to mention it, but she gave him shit about the sun rising in the morning so there really wasn’t much to be said beyond that. In reality it was just easier to fade back from everyone and let the rest of the world sort itself out.

He leaped from the end of the first stairwell to the curved top of another that twisted down in a widening arc until it ended at a wall. It felt fitting, walking a downward spiral right into a dead end after leaving Dave to suffer quietly in his buzzing gloomy room. _His_ Dave, the living Dave, the one who had survived over all other timelines. He’d _dreamed_ of seeing ‘his’ Dave again after the three years on Jade’s ship. More than anything he’d wanted to jump into that imaginary bliss of just being able to be _friends_ again, to talk and play and make up for all the time they’d lost on their final trek to the battlefield. Then the game ended. The survivors wished their new world to life, and then...

Then they’d all pretended to be people again, like replaying a game on easy mode with all the cheats. There were glitches, losses, empty pockets where memories should have been, and never quite enough time to try and pick up where things had left off. Little by little, John had faded back to watch Dave learn what ‘moirail’ meant with Karkat all too happy to teach him.

He’d missed out on so much time he wasn’t sure he even knew how to _be_ friends with Dave any more, all his attempts to fall back into step with him had fallen into a series of ever more hopeless awkward silences, that his time had been wasted and used up, and that his value even as an acquaintance was dwindling to nothing, that the quiet between them whenever they were together would eventually stretch so far that Dave wouldn’t even bother calling him any longer.

He walked into a wall.

The spiral staircase ended; his shoes hit cement and he stumbled forward, just barely catching himself before crushing his face against the blank wall that should have been a door, if the building had been made by anyone other than a Strider. The timed light bulb above the landing flickered to anemic yellow life, buzzed for five seconds, and then faded, and died. John looked at his hands, pressed against the wall, watching them dissolve as the light left, and wondered if the rest of him was vanishing as well, or if the whole idea of fading was just an avoidant metaphor.

He stepped back, sat on the stairs. The indents of his sneakers were still damp on the stair treads; he took the cold to be another metaphor - this time for the kick in the ass he should have given himself before skittering out of Dave’s apartment like a wimp instead of staying like he wanted to.

_Did_ he want to?

What a stupid question. Of course he _wanted_ to go back. He wanted to fly up the stairwell and back into Dave’s apartment and balance on the futon next to him and talk him through whatever shit was weighing him down until it was gone or at least more manageable. He wanted to talk to Dave about Terezi, maybe convince him to try someone else for a while, step back and stop trying to desperately fix something that was just going to stay broken or break worse, maybe try to fix something that still had a chance, to try _anything_ else.

So, question two: why didn’t he?

Because he was afraid of going back to that buzzing silence. He was afraid of it filling up the space between them until it pushed him out the door again. Which was all the better reason to go back, right? Muscle through the nervousness and four years worth of being absurdly sub-par on the friend front and making up for all of it in one fell swoop by just _being there_ when Dave needed him.

_He does need you, clearly._

He wouldn’t have sent that message, otherwise, right?

Hope was Jake’s thing, but it was difficult to not get infected by it from time to time. John fiddled with his shoelaces and looked up through the gloom to the single fluorescent light glowing over the door to the Striders’ apartment. Maybe that’s all he wanted, to be _needed_ by someone. Better Dave than anyone, because he really, trulythought he might need Dave, too.

He should have stayed when Dave stopped him. He’d feel like a fool going back up there now.

“What are you doing?” He asked aloud.

“I was just about to ask you the same question.”

    John _jumped_ , turning on the ascent, sneaker squeaking under him as he spun a full 180, back slapping hard against the wall. Dirk stood at the top of the arced staircase, a soldering iron in one hand and what looked like a mechanical leg in the other. Backlit by the single light over the apartment door, all John could really see of his face was the eerie red pinpoint glow from his shades; Lil Hal was watching him as well.

“Nuh- nothing?” He stuttered out, pushing away from the wall, sheepish and clumsy. Dirk’s head tilted to one side, the robotic foot came up and nudged at the edge of his shades.

“Did you and Dave have a fight?”

“What? No, I’m just-”

“Because the only reason I can think of for you sitting out here all by your lonesome is that you two had some kind of falling out.”

John blinked at him. It’s difficult to read Dirk on a good day; he got the poker face down better than Dave ever did, but down in the dark, getting any kind of clue from his expression was impossible. He frowned, shook his head, damp hair falling into his eyes, streaking against his glasses.

“No, nothing like that. I’m just... uh.” He spread his hands, grasping for an answer he couldn’t define.

“‘Just uh?’” Dirk prompted.

John lowered his head, hunched his shoulders into a shrug. “Just... being kind of dumb, I guess,” he muttered. “I should-”

“Go back up and talk to him.”

He glanced back up at Dirk, whose shadow had moved along the stairwell to a gangplank perched unsteadily between two landings. The red, watchful flash from Lil Hal was no longer visible; he could almost see Dirk staring at him from behind the sharp frame of his shades. Dirk’s head turned towards the apartment door; in the light John could just barely see him frown. “Talk to him,” he says again. “It’s in your best interest.”

“I-”

“Trust me on this, man. Don’t just let this shit go.”

Dirk turned from him then, taking the gangplank to a stairway leading down almost vertically, his footfalls silent. John stared after him until his eyes strained in the dark, until he heard the brief open and shut of a door, somewhere down in the pit of the stairwell.

_Trust me on this._

He supposed...

Dirk _would_ know about the troubles of silence, wouldn’t he.

John looked up to the apartment door again.

It took barely a breath to rise up to the landing, less time to slip back in, closing the door behind him.

 --

Predictably, Dave hadn’t moved from his spot on the futon. The snack bag had been lifted up to place of honor just within arm’s reach next to his hip. The game had finally been unpaused and he was attempting to play one-handed, the other still tucked under his pillow for support. John glanced at the TV just as the dudebro on the skateboard ran into some kind of pixel glitch, doing a mad conga while stuck through the torso by a rail. Dave muttered a curse under his breath and pushed the controller to the floor with a clatter.

“Sore loser, Dave?” John asked. Dave jumped, jerking his head so fast his shades went askew, and then scowled. John had to fight a grin; he loved getting the drop on Dave, if only for the way he grumbled about it.

“Jesus _fuck_ , John, warn a brother if you’re going to pull your zap bullshit again, would you? Goddamn fickle son of a bitch...” Dave set his shades straight again, then put his leg out to catch the futon before it could topple to the floor. Once he’d pushed it back to something like a sustainable balance, he slid back to his former position, pushing himself up on his elbows. His mouth twisted into a confused frown, the glare off his shades reflected at John like a question.

“What brought you back, bro?”

John shrugged loosely at him, then sat cross-legged at the head of the futon, facing Dave at eye level. “I felt bad about leaving you alone.”

Dave’s frown deepened, wavered, twitched up almost to a smile. “The hell you did.”

“The hell, I did.” John swallowed back any admission that Dirk had convinced him, that if it hadn’t been for that little intrusion he probably would have sat in the shadows for the next two hours before slinking dejectedly back home through the rain.

He fidgeted with his pants cuffs again. It was warm in the apartment but his hands felt clammy, on the back of his neck he felt phantom chill. He tried not to let his brain panic back into silence, to admit that he knew, desperately, that there was a particular, exact, frightful reason he wanted to come back. That he knew his place as ‘best friend’ had been revoked and it wasn’t something he could ever really recall or beg back. More than that ‘best friend’ wasn’t quite what he’d wanted to be for a long time.

_You know maybe-_

"You know maybe this thing you have with Terezi-"

Dave grunted into the pillow. "Don't want to talk about it, man."

John paused, caught his breath in the back of his throat. Bad timing. It was bad timing and this was a bad idea. He shouldn’t have come back.

_Trust me on this._ What exactly had Dirk wanted him to be trusting about?

_You know._

"No, I mean, maybe you should try out someone else for a while."

Dave snorted at him. “Don’t tell me you’re taking that buttslave jive seriously.”

“Shut up, I don’t want to be your buttslave,” John grumbled back. He was flustered, pulling, tearing at the cuffs of his jeans, twisting the loosed threads around his fingers so hard the circulation started to cut off, turning his fingertips icy blue. “It’s just that you keep doing this off again on again thing with Terezi and every time she dumps you it kind of freaks me out because you end up doing _this-_ ” he gestured to the room at large; the denim thread around his fingers ripped with the motion, falling between them like cut puppet strings. His hand fell after, down to his face, taking off his glasses to clean off the wet smears with the edge of his shirt.

“Hey John, I mean, don’t worry about me,” Dave reached out, taking the glasses from him, wiping them clean with the leftover paper towel from his ice pack. Once they were clean he put them back on John’s face, tapping the bridge in place. “I can take care of myself.”

“Why, though? Why can’t I take care of you a little, Dave?”

He didn’t mean to sound quite so desperate. But his voice cracked, and when it did he gulped back his breath and looked down. The pit of his stomach felt cold. So did his skin, everything. He went dumb with regret and shame. Silence once again made itself comfortable between them.

“You’re taking care of me now,” Dave began, but John shook his head, cutting him off.

“That’s not the point. That’ not what I’m... um, not what I’m asking.”

Dave propped himself up a little higher, leaning forward. The futon creaked ominously underneath him. “John, are you asking me to be your boyfriend?”

“Um-”

“John, are you going to _kiss me?”_ Dave grinned like a fox as he said it, wiggling his shoulders for emphasis.

“No! Dude, your girlfriend just dumped you, I’m not going to kiss you after that!”

Dave leaned in; the futon started to lean with him, then pitched forward. John’s hands shot up to catch the edge of it to keep it from crushing him. Dave leaned forward a little further; it was all John could do to keep from dropping the futon and running out the door.

“I bet you wanna,” Dave smirked. His face was drawing close. He wasn’t _serious,_ clearly, he was just fucking around but John was stuck and if he _did_ go for it John wasn’t going to stop him.

“I’m.... I’m going to drop you,” he threatened.

“No, you aren’t.”

No, he wasn’t. He couldn’t, and though he knew it was just a joke, entirely at his expense, he didn’t pull away when Dave kissed him, almost patronizingly, on the nose.

All he had to do was lift his chin a little. That was it, just a few centimeters distance and Dave’s prank would be his triumph (briefly, until Dave punched him for being too forward, for being a dick, for taking advantage of him, for all of the above) but he couldn’t just-

His arms flagged under the pressure the weight of Dave and the futon put on them. They dropped, just an inch. Dave’s mouth crashed into his, shades clacking against glasses and John felt his own lips cut against his teeth. He tasted blood but only really felt Dave, and Dave’s mouth, and shock.

Dave lingered.

John’s arms ached under the weight but Dave lingered, stayed. John could feel their breath mingling between each other’s teeth and yet still he didn’t pull away. It was not his first kiss but it was probably the most unsure, definitely the most awkward.

His shoulders started to burn, Dave’s mouth moved. John could feel his breath, and every syllable, he felt them right down to his bones.

“You gonna kiss me for real, John?”

“I-” John’s arms gave again, and the futon dropped further, far enough that he could just set it on the floor now and be done with it. He let go; it hit the floor with a thud. Dave had pressed all the way up onto his hands, angled awkwardly with his knees angled against the still-braced edge of the futon.

“I’m sorry,” John started. Dave’s face was still level with his own, his arms hurt, his fingers had pinched, and his mouth _ached._

Dave’s face was grave now; the TV’s glow caught behind his shades and just briefly John could see his eyes, their color dimmed to murk but no less sharp for the shadows.

“Why didn’t you say anything, man?” Dave asked, not bothering to move, holding the weird pushup with utter stillness, even when the snack back clattered to the ground next to them, completely motionless until John began to move away. One hand snaked out, twisted in the collar of John’s shirt, held him in place. “John, why didn’t you say anything?”

John shivered, colder than he was before, though his mouth still ached heat at him. “I didn’t want to be wrong.”

The corner of Dave’s mouth curled up, long-suffering and sardonic; behind his shades his eyes rolled. “You’re not wrong, you fucking old lady. Jesus.”

“Oh,” came John’s dumb reply. He blinked again, owlish, surprised, a little scared and so relieved he wasn’t even sure what to do with himself. “Not wrong. So this... this isn’t like a rebound thing?”

“You say that again and I’m gonna fucking hit you,” Dave threatened, the fist in John’s shirt shaking him a little.

“Okay! Okay fine, not a rebound thing. I just, you know, this is bad timing.”

“It’s fucking awful timing is what it is, which I of all people would know exactly the details about. Shit, I’m half tempted to literally go back and time and just mack on you for the last hour instead of watching you shit yourself over whether or not to crank this up from best bros to makeout buddies.”

“Please don’t, I don’t think I’d be able to live in a timeline with no company but my own desperate failure.” John tried on a grin for size, and received its twin from Dave.

“You’re still kind of freaking out, though.” Dave loosened his grip on John’s shirt, but his hand didn’t quite drop, yet. “You’re probably gonna for a little bit, aren’t you?”

“Yeah that’s gonna be a thing.”

“Thought so.” Dave nodded, then pulled back, drawing his legs under him so he could sit, butt on the floor and back against the tilted futon. “But the kissing, that’s gonna be a thing, too.”

John nodded mutely at him, and then screwed up his courage to something functional. “I don’t, you know, I said I wasn’t going to say it, but I don’t want to be a rebound. I don’t want to take anyone’s place; I just want to do this kissing thing because I like you.”

“ _Jesus_ Egbert please try and lay it on a little thicker, I can still breathe through the stink of nervous nerd funk,” Dave sniped, but even as he did he leaned forward, and his mouth was on John’s again, quick but unshy. He leaned back to speak, then grimaced. His nose bled again, and this time he wiped the offensive leak on the back of his sleeve. “Fuck, that’s nasty. I don’t think I got any on you.”

John laughed at him, light and easy. One kiss had been enough to knock him reeling but two made him giddy, simple-minded with anticipatory happiness. It bubbled up inside him so bright and sudden that he almost didn’t catch the one wrong note, the difference, the _something_ that almost killed his laugh.

It was a voice.

He was sure it was his own voice, but it came from an infinite distance, and at the same time was so close he could almost feel it being whispered into his ear. It didn’t sound out in the air but murmured into his head, right into the part of his brain that thought in words, making his skin prickle.

_He’s so pretty when he bleeds._

The thought was wrong, out of place, a drop of poison in clear water. He shook it away as soon as it made itself present in his brain, but as they set right the futon, finding something sturdier to brace it on so they could lie together, it bubbled up again, simmering quietly in the back of his mind.

_So pretty, when he bleeds._

\--

 


	2. Two (Tension)

White Noise  
Two (Tension)  
\--

 

On the nights he couldn’t sleep, John would fly.

Those nights weren’t rare; sometimes he felt like all the time he’d spent walking through dream bubbles was being made up for now by unshakable, inescapable wakefulness. Hours and hours passed him without pause for rest, so when the sun set and the streets of the city emptied he would give himself a running start. Sometimes he’d ascend at a park, sometimes leaping against the sides of buildings, off the tops of mailboxes or lamp posts. He’d kick off into the sky and keep going until the air became so thin even he couldn’t pull breath into his lungs.

Then, freefall.

He’d drop, through the nimbus, the stratus, the cumulus, until his skin prickled and he could feel the ground rushing too close. Until his descent threatened absolute finality. Then he would pull the wind under him, dragging himself out of a swan dive and into a bowl-curve. Up, and up, and again reaching for that invisible barrier where atmosphere ended and vacuum began.

He hadn’t told anyone about his midnight excursions but Rose. She’d looked at him in that way - where her head tipped and her fingers drew together in front of her mouth, eyes narrowed. He’d let her try to talk him through it once until after an hour of beating around the psychological bush she’d said post-traumatic stress and he’d shut the conversation down, backed out, and never brought it up again. She’d tried, still tried if she saw that the skin under his eyes was dark with exhaustion, but he wouldn’t hear it.

He didn’t need psychoanalysis, he just needed to tire himself out. He had his own method, and it worked just fine.

Rarely, he’d give himself a destination. He’d seen more of the world on restless nights than he could accurately map. Sometimes he’d sleep after, waking on the steps of a temple or on the soft needle bed of pine barrens. Then, for a while after, he’d sleep just fine in his bed, without dreams or silent anxieties prickling him back awake.

It had been four days, and sleep had not yet come.

Four days since Dave’s apartment. He figured it was nerves, giddiness. The atmosphere between them had changed; suddenly the feeling of a slow fade had revolved to a sudden rush of being pulled back into everything. 

Dave liked to touch, was always touching, always reaching. John was used to it. Dave being handsy was nothing new, but when he touched now John felt the ground drop out from under him and he was in freefall again, because a touch would turn into a caress and then with startling frequency Dave would pull him into a kiss and he’d hit the ground, crashing into pieces that broke off and floated away, everything but for where Dave touched him.

The backs of his fingers scraped a branch, reaching naked above a yellowing canopy of oak trees. He pulled back abruptly, the intrusion sent him spinning up into the air on a tiny, startled whirlwind. His fingers itched where the bark scraped him. 

Perhaps it was time to stop flying. 

John righted himself, smoothing out the wind underneath him until it let him down gently through the treetops, a silent elevator dropping him lower, lower, until his sneakers squelched against the wet carpet of leaves at the tree’s base. 

The temperature had dropped, turning the rain into an early snow, and then suddenly late summer had made one more push through the chill, melting the snow and startling the trees and plants into a false spring. The smell of new growth under the decaying leaves of early autumn was sharp against the back of his throat. There was still an intermittent drip pattering through thin mist that obscured everything less than a foot or so off the ground. For a moment, he thought he’d brought the clouds down with him, or maybe he’d flown too far without realizing it, to some fog-soaked alpine ridge.

A minute of walking later, and he found he was at the tree-lined park just down the street from his house.

Or, not really his house. It was Mr. Crocker’s house, the Dad that had survived; Jane’s Dad. Not his dad, with the harlequins and too much cake and the aggressively boring private life. Jane’s Dad, who was… so much like his Dad, only lacking memories and the little tiny mannerisms and anything that really mattered. Oh, he was nice, to the point that he’d insisted John stay with them, that he not go out alone, that he needed to be near family. John would have been flattered, was a little flattered, but it all felt a little cold when he remembered Mr. Crocker slipping up just once and calling him ‘Dad.’

It had been weird, unsettling. He’d felt awful for days, like he was wearing the ghost of his other life on his shoulders. He’d been borderline resentful, the basic, hateful unfairness of the universe that had let Jane keep her father while his had no room in their new reality had pushed him right over one in many downward steps from that first year. It hadn’t been good for anyone, he knew, but at least the others, in their way, had all gotten replacements for the ones they’d lost. None of them had to share.

Thinking on it now, he rolled his eyes at his past self for ever being so petty. Even if he still couldn’t bring himself to call Mr. Crocker ‘dad,’ Even if he still put Mr. Crocker down as his uncle on any official paperwork.

Even if he spent a lot of time avoiding the man, because the basic lack of remembrance on his face was sometimes too painful to take. 

From here, with dawn just starting to make a real crawl over the horizon, he could see the house, the swing, Mr. Crocker’s car. It was steaming in the chill; warming up for the drive into town, to whatever boring office building where Mr. Crocker’s boring job took place.

There was a soft whirring behind him; John stepped off of the street and onto the sidewalk as a mail truck passed him, making its weary, halting rounds down the street. The red flag on the Crocker/Egbert mailbox (his name carefully stencilled in under theirs, just inside the box) was raised when the mail truck went on its way, disappearing down the street in the early mist. 

He meandered to the mailbox, dropping the flag and pulling out the flimsy stack. Postcards, some business mail, weekly newsletters. He checked the postcards - both from Jade (and by extension, Eridan, who never wrote but for the occasional snide comment in the margins) both with return addresses that were nigh unintelligible. Hellos from a distant land. He stuffed the one addressed to him in his back pocket.

The front door opened and he could see Jane, shivering in her bathrobe, silhouetted against the warm glow of the house. Her breath steamed out to mingle with the mist. 

“Jesus, John, this is the fourth night in a row,” she sighed at him. 

John took his time along the walkway to the door, giving her a minimal shrug. “It was a good night for flying,” he said. He stepped just close enough to hold the mail out to Jane; she untucked one hand from within her robe. He wasn’t fast enough to dodge - her hand changed course and snatched his wrist.

“You’re soaked,” Jane chided, pulling his arm, pulling him closer to the house. John planted his feet, shaking his head. Jane rolled her eyes, letting out a sigh that rose up into a little cloud of mist above their heads. “Come on, at least come in for breakfast. Get changed.”

John shook his head again, and gently started to peel her fingers away from his wrist. “I’m fine, I’m not hungry.” It was a lie, he could probably eat everything in the fridge, if the exhaustion didn’t catch up with him first. It was just-

“Jane, what are you- Oh.”

Mr. Crocker, arms up, knotting his tie in a perfect half-windsor, peered over Jane’s shoulder just as John managed to free himself from her grasp. He shoved the letters into her open hand, and took a step back. 

It was difficult to look at him, in the early dimness and through a sleepless fog it was easy to not see the little things that separated James Crocker from who he had been when he was James Egbert. No little scars on his hands from the meteor incident that had taken Nana, fewer stress wrinkles at the corner of his eyes, though a little more silver in the hair… but James Crocker had lived longer, and earned that silver.

“Morning,” John said, backing down the front walk. Half-windsor. That was the difference, he always could tell even in the dim early mornings after the worst bouts of insomnia. Mr. Crocker was a half-windsor man, but Dad had preferred the four-in-hand knot. John could remember learning how to tie each different knot, how to tell the difference, sitting on the kitchen counter with a tie draped over his shoulders, tying the thing into incomprehensible loops while Dad cooked or baked or coaxed him along.

He’d thought it was so stupid, back then. He’d never been able to get the knot to lay perfectly straight. His foot dropped off the edge of the walkway and he stumbled, catching himself with a little puff of wind.

They stared at him from the doorway, still as a picture now that Mr. Crocker had finished with his tie. 

It wasn’t like they were asking him to go. He knew realistically that they were more concerned with asking him to stay. They were nice, even. Most of the time he could stand being around them. It was just a question of belonging, and John didn’t. Not that either of them would say so, or even hint that was the case. He just knew that it was and did his best to stay out of their way and keep his life as separate as possible without breaking off completely.

Mr. Crocker broke the thin illusion. He patted Jane on the shoulder, leaned back to take his jacket, and then nodded to John.

“You’ll be home for dinner?” He said in the tone of voice that anyone who didn’t know better would mistake for a question. John nodded, nearly turned to leave, then paused. 

“Is it all right if I bring Dave?”

They both seemed a little stunned at the question. He was a little surprised himself; normally it was ‘you mind if I eat somewhere else tonight?’ He almost never invited someone over. Not for any particular reason, it was just… difficult. 

But Mr. Crocker smiled, Jane mimicking it almost perfectly. “Of course, your friends are always welcome,” Mr. Crocker said. He took a few long strides down the walk to his car, then paused, his hand lingering on the door handle. “Do you want a ride, John?”

John was already retreating along the walk when the question made him still again. This time he couldn’t tell if it was an offer or an order, and decided to hell with erring on the side of caution. He shoved his hands in his pockets and shook his head. “Nah, I’ll walk. Um, thanks though.”

Mr. Crocker nodded, doffed his hat, and got into his car. There was a long minute where John wondered if he really was supposed to get in, if this was the signal for one of those Important Talks One Must Have With An Adult, but the car finally backed out of the driveway and went on down the street, maybe a little under the speed limit, maybe idling too long at the stop sign at the end of the block, but eventually the car and Mr. Crocker disappeared into the morning mist.

John didn’t realize Jane had come up to stand next to him until she spoke, making him jump and stumble off the sidewalk. 

“You really need to talk to someone about this sleeping thing,” she said, reaching out to grab the sleeve of his jacket, tugging him back onto the path, using the momentum to turn him so they faced each other. She knew he hated it, how she could read his moves and copy the exact frown he gave to someone else who was acting like a jackass, and she did it anyway because she could and there was clearly nothing he could do to stop her. It was like looking into a soft-focus mirror, and it annoyed the shit out of him, especially knowing that he should have been giving himself the same look in real mirrors for the past few days. If not the past few years.

“It’s fine,” John grumbled, trying and failing to tug his arm out of her grasp. “I’m just kind of jittery about things right now. Um, kind of a big thing happened and I’m still working through it.”

“What big thing?” She moved a little closer, enough that standing level it really was like a mirror. Jane moved when he did, mapping every twitch to keep him from avoiding her gaze. “John, come on. What big thing?”

A gust of wind shook the trees, stirring the mist, shoving Jane back away from him and towards the house like a giant invisible hand. Jane yelped and stumbled but caught her balance before she fell. John jittered back a few paces, putting up his hands. “Sorry. I’ll tell you later, just…” he took a few more steps back - he could see her building up towards getting seriously pissed - “Not right now, okay? Let me figure it out.”

“John. Egbert.” Jane squared up her shoulders, fists clenched, taking a few hard steps towards him. John danced back, hands at surrender. He shouldn’t have called the wind on her, shouldn’t have pushed her back.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, and for a second he wasn’t sure if he meant it. He just needed some time, some coffee, some sleep, food, anything, as long as it was anything away from here. He needed to be where Dave was for a little while, to get his head on straight. “Dinner, I promise, I’ll let you know,” he said.

Then, before Jane could lunge for him, he turned and ran, taking to the air before the mist swallowed her angry yell for him to come back.

\--

John flew just above the cover of the mist until it started to burn off in the morning sun, taking himself lower until he was taking more time dodging branches than actually flying. He let himself down behind a bus stop, empty for now on this part of town, one of the midday express lines that ran only at unreliable intervals on a mostly useless route. He sat on the cold bench and rubbed his face, digging his thumbs into his eyes until the geometric dance of false light started to make him dizzy.

Pissing off Jane had been a stupid idea. He’d have to make it up to her, maybe bring something to dinner or offer to help cook this time (not that she’d let him - he was an awful cook - but it was the thought that counted, right?) or at least take care of the cleanup after. And of course he’d tell her, eventually, about Dave. Maybe even about how weird his headspace had been just before, about how he was still trying to balance out actually wanting to be a part of the world again, as long as Dave was around.

He just needed to level that thought, to come to grips with the idea that Dave seemed to be the only anchor he wanted, despite probably not being the only one he needed. If he looked at it realistically, it seemed like an awful lot of pressure to put on one person. It seemed unfair, and stupid, like he was jumping the gun, latching on too quick to an offer he hadn’t entirely thought through. That maybe this really was a rebound thing and he’d end up disappointed and heartbroken.

And yet Dave had made it more than abundantly clear that he wasn’t anything of the sort. That, at least, he could trust. Dave was terrible at lying - his face got red and you could see his eyes trying to break contact from behind the shades. He didn’t have tells, he had big neon signs. The thought made him smile; there had been a time when Dave had existed only in walls of red text, a long labyrinth of words and obfuscating irony and at it’s center: Dave, who wasn’t exactly as good with irony or keeping a straight face or any kind of real dishonesty that didn’t involve a lot of forethought and even then couldn’t have any guilt attached or he’d choke. 

John conjured Dave’s face up in his mind, trying to imagine how long they could make it through dinner before Jane’s probing looks and Mr. Crocker’s kind ambivalence got to him, before he blurted out something like ‘so if anyone’s interested I’m planning on banging John in the near future.’ The idea made the back of his neck prick hot with a blush. Oh, the things they could do now. 

But first, he needed coffee, something stronger than the stuff at the Crocker house. Sweet and hot, in a tiny cup. Espresso might do it; he’d be jazzed for a while and then maybe he could finally dive down, find his way back to his bed in a caffeine crash haze and let the world go quiet for a few hours. Just so he could sleep without dreaming, just for a little while, to catch up. 

Coffee, cafe. There was one just west of the bus stop. John could just see the sign if he squinted hard enough. He pushed off of the bench, spun on his heel, almost went wide off the sidewalk and into a decorative tree. Closed his eyes again and continued along his way, following the quiet. 

Dave, still in his head. Serious, grinning, avoidant, expectant, loud like the ticking heart of time John imagined he’d hear if he sat in the middle of a clock tower. Cool, not. Hot, definitely, many iterations of hot. Calling him up to dinner would get him teased, ‘God John that’s so fucking traditional am I gonna have to ask Crocker for your hand in marriage?’

He bumped into something soft; it uttered a familiar laugh. his eyes snapped open and he jumped back to apologize, looked down and-

“Rose! How-” He stopped the stupid question before he could finish asking it. Asking Rose how she knew where and when to be when she wanted to meet with someone without their knowing was about as stupid as asking if water was wet. It also had the unfortunate side effect of being exposed to a nice, acidic, lengthy lecture on how easy it is to be forgotten, usually starting with ‘Oh my, it seems you have amnesia.’

Her mouth was already forming the ‘oh’ when he waved his hand to stop her. 

“Nope, nope, it is too early for that, Miss Lalonde,” he said, making an x over his chest with his arms. Rose smiled, then nodded. 

“As you say. It’s certainly very early for you, Mister Egbert.” Her chin tilted up, and her smile thinned out to a straight line, just edging a frown. “You haven’t slept.”

He shrugged. “I’ve been flying.” He half-turned, pulling open the cafe door to let her pass through. “It was a good night for flying,” he elaborated, uselessly. She kept the neutral-bordering-on-dissatisfied look on her face as she passed him, only smiling again when the barista greeted them both.  
He considered skipping out. He could always close the door and sprint until he found a quiet place to take off, but then, if Rose thought he’d do such a thing, she wouldn’t have gone into the Cafe. Unless...  
Ugh, too early to try and think in paradoxes. Besides, one never could tell if Rose really did see the way things were going to go, or if she was so good at bluffing that people like him went along with what she wanted simply because it was supposed to be a foregone conclusion. 

Rose ordered their drinks, he paid for both. They took the booth furthest back from the door to wait. Rose set her back on the seat beside her, set her elbows on the table, and folded her hands under her chin, watching him expectantly. 

John tried not to flinch under her gaze. It was difficult; he never knew how much she could tell from just looking at him, and never knew if she was going to bring up one obvious issue or another, or let things be. He never knew, not until after the conversation had ended and they’d gone their separate ways. At the very least he kept his foot from jiggling under the table, but his fingers picked at the cuffs of his jacket - frayed, like the rest of him.

Their coffee arrived before either his reluctance or her patience could break. He poured too much sugar into his mug. Rose took hers black; she continued to watch him as she took a sip. Whatever was filtering music into the cafe tipped over to something with a lot of banjo and the sound of it made the back of his teeth ache while he gulped down his too-sweet coffee. 

His foot started to jiggle just as he set down his mug. He could only think of one topic Rose would corner him about that didn’t involve lecturing him on his health (not immediately, anyway) and there was no way he could think of to start a conversation that had such touchy subjects like Dave and whether or not John had spent the last few days getting intimately acquainted with how good Dave was at kissing.

Okay, perhaps intimately acquainted was pushing it a little. They’d kissed on the futon, again when he’d left the Strider apartment for home, and then, yesterday (or the day before?) in front of the train station. A few times more, privately. All brief, but all of them... good. He’d enjoyed them. He counted them and set them aside in a little pocket of his memory, where all the Good Things went. Every time Dave kissed him he was surprised by how enjoyable it was. He hadn’t yet screwed up the courage to initiate a kiss, but soon, very soon.

Rose’s hands were tucked under her chin again. Her mouth had curved back up into that knowing, sardonic smile. 

“Uh, so, have you...” he tried to still his leg, but the agitated bouncing of his knee went on unabated. “Um, anything interesting going on lately?”

Rose shrugged. “Not of late. I met with Kanaya yesterday, but that is usual.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I’ve been hanging out with Dave,” he tried to smile in a way that did not indicate that ‘hanging’ should have been ‘making.’ 

Rose’s serene smile did not budge one inch. She knows, John thought, picking up his mug again for another teeth-aching swig.

“You have been together quite a bit recently,” she replied. Her eyebrows didn’t so much as twitch but he could hear the Eyebrow Raise of Inquisition in her voice. 

“Um, yes.” There was not a single thing he could say that would stop that tone in her voice. Not one damn thing he could do before she made some kind of obvious remark and then he would blush and stutter and probably act stupid. He looked over at Rose, and for just a minute her carefully polite smile had softened a little into a kind of expectant fondness. Not because she knew, he realized, but because watching him agonize over what she knew and how to broach the subject was likely her prime entertainment. John sighed out a little laugh, and his nervousness began to dissipate. Not for the first time he thought that, with Rose, he might someday understand what pale love really meant.

“Yeah, well, it’s not like we’re picking out matching cumberbunds for a wedding or anything,” he said, pushing his mug towards the edge of the table. “The, um. You know, with Terezi. It’s still pretty fresh.”

“Yes, I hadn’t expected Dave to bounce to someone else so quickly,” Rose murmured, her voice cool and level. She was staring at him again, watching his reaction carefully. He slumped in his seat. It was no good trying to put on a brave face; she saw right through it without error.

“I’m kind of… well, worried about exactly that. I don’t want to be the rebound guy.”

“I very much doubt Dave would ever put you down as just the ‘rebound guy,” Rose replied. She reached over the table, putting her hand around his, and gently pulling his fingers away from their vice grip on the coffee cup. “You know he does like to put on airs, but he does take relationships seriously. Not the least the relationships with those who are already dear friends.”

"Right," John said, turning his hand to squeeze her fingers. "You're right, I'm probably overthinking. It's just... Kind of a surprise? Not a bad surprise, a really good one. But it's just he's my best friend, so," he shrugged, holding up his free hand in a useless gesture.

Rose put her head to one side, her mouth tilting back up into a smile. "From personal experience, I can attest that falling in love with someone you consider to be your best friend is a very good thing to have happen." She squeezed his fingers again, then retreated to her coffee. For a moment, John allowed himself to be convinced that he'd survive this conversation without-

"I can also attest, from extensive research," Rose said, grinning wickedly at him over her cup, "that you may want to invest in water based lubricants in the near future. It’s healthier than silicon.”

“Oh god,” John covered his face with his hands, sinking down into his seat. “Rose, no. Please no. I’m having a hard enough time-”

“Or you’re going to,” she interrupted, the wickedness in her smile intensifying. John snorted at her from behind his hands.

“Shut uuuuuuuup,” he groaned, crossing his arms over his head. “Rose, you are not even helping a little!”

“Tell her something she doesn’t know,” was the voice in his ear. John jumped, his knees knocking against the underside of the table, arms going up in surprise or surrender, leaning away from the speaker until he realized, with a sudden, manic joy, that the speaker was Dave. Dave smiling at him, leaning over the back of the booth, hair damp from the fog, eyes sleepy behind his shades. 

Rose was laughing at him, but she was inconsequential for now, just another part of the scenery. John scooted aside enough for Dave to sit next to him, gesturing a little too grandly as he did. The exhaustion, the misty edge to the world dissipated as Dave sat close, warm, smiling at him or at nothing, taking the mug John had abandoned, taking a sip, making a face equal parts disgust and respect.

“Damn, is this coffee or coffee flavored sugar water you’re putting in your body? This is fucking disgusting.” Dave finished off the mug, then slumped in his seat, his head resting on John’s shoulder briefly before something Rose said had him animated again, gesturing at her in fondness or annoyance.

John’s arm seized, twitched, he wasn’t sure if he should put his arm around Dave’s shoulder or stay still. His heart was up and galloping, shaking his ribs and making his throat feel swollen. He settled for leaning on the table, hands crossed in front of his mouth, eyes on Dave, watching him scrunch up his face at Rose, at coffee, at being awake in general. Watching his mouth move with a kind of intense focus that he forgot he had the capability of utilizing. 

Rose’s fingers snapped next to his ear. He yelped, knees knocking once again against the underside of the table. Dave, laughing, caught silverware as the sudden jolt sent them flying.

John flushed, covering his face with his hands. “Sorry, sorry, I’m sorry I’m just tired,” he groaned. Dave’s arm snaked around his shoulder, shaking him good-naturedly. 

“I told you so,” Rose said, her voice piercing through the haze like a needle. John smiled behind his hands as she continued talking. “Both of you need sleep. Dave, you’ve studied as much as is humanly possible, even for you. John,” he dropped his hands. She was leaning forward, just inches away, violet eyes boring into his with the intensity of a very close, perturbed sun. “You’re a mess, Mister Egbert. Go sleep with my brother.”

“Rose, I am scandalized,” Dave gasped, pulling John back out of Rose’s hypnotic stare, shoving John’s head to his chest and mock-patting his hair. “Such solicitations in front of poor, sweet, baby John, and in public as well?” He let out a loud, mock sigh. “I thought better of you, Rose darling.”

“You’ll think better about the back of my hand in a moment, David,” Rose growled back, waving her hands at them. “God, look at you idiots. Would you go take a nap already?”

They clambered out together, Dave dragging John behind him, out of the cafe and along the sidewalk, making faces at Rose through the cafe’s window before darting further down the street, John in tow. 

“No way in hell am I getting to sleep any time soon,” Dave said, letting go of John’s arm long enough to let him turn around and walk, then latching onto his wrist again. “I’ve been up all night chugging Red Bull and reading sad plays for English. Real fucking southern gothic shit with nervous breakdowns and scandals and crap. I feel like I’m gonna have a nervous breakdown reading this shit. Jesus, you look like a fucking meth addict. When’s the last time you slept?”

John blinked, his brain catching up to Dave’s mouth at a ten second delay. “Oh, just… I mean, I was out flying,” he said lamely, the excuse sounding more flimsy now that the sun was burning off the mist, and Dave was staring sideways at him, fingers pressed up against the pulse in his wrist. He sighed. “Just a couple days,” he admitted.

“Just a couple?” Dave came to a halt, then peered closely at John, the corners of his mouth tugging to a frown. “Oh man look at your eyes you aren’t even fucking around. What’s wrong? Are you sick?”

“No, I just…” John shrugged, tried halfheartedly to pull his wrist from Dave’s grip, and then gave up. “Just kind of anxious, I don’t know.”

“Anxious?” Dave turned, grabbing John’s free wrist, drawing him close, making John’s pulse jump stupidly. “What about?”

You, this, us, pick one, John thought while his brain struggled to make his mouth move. 

“Do you want to come to dinner tonight?” is what came out instead. He could see Dave blinking behind the shades, each one taking him in degrees from confusion to clarity. 

“Oh my god, John, did you just spend the last couple days not sleeping because you were agonizing about asking me out to dinner? Because that’s what this is sounding like to me right now.”

John stuttered, looking away. “Y-yeah,” he said. That seemed as good an explanation as any. It made sense, right?

“You’re such a fucking dweeb, John,” Dave said, tugging John’s wrists to make him bend enough that Dave could kiss him.

The haze that had been lingering in John’s head grew heavy. If there was a world, it had blurred into mist again. There was no necessary thing that existed now but Dave, nothing more coveted. Dave began to laugh and the kiss ended, leaving John’s mouth feeling numb and clumsy. He grinned back, Dave laughed again, then stepped back, dropping one of John’s hands so they could walk. “Of course I’ll come to dinner,” he said, dropping his chin, adjusting his shades. John could just see the blush darkening his skin before he started to walk again, tugging John along with. 

\--

They’d made it as far as Mr. Crocker’s living room. Jane was home still, watching tv, and when they’d stumbled in they’d collapsed onto the couch next to her. They were asleep by the time Jane had come back with a blanket.

She watched them sleep, tangled up on the couch, using each other as a pillow. She hadn’t seen Dave much, recently. Then again she wasn’t surprised; the whole ‘hot mom’ thing had been a hilariously awkward joke for a while, but once that shared humor had run its course, it had been harder to interact with someone who had for such a long time been the enigmatic ‘Dirk’s Bro.’ Sometimes she caught herself watching his face, shocked by how animated it was compared to Dirk, who had never seemed to get the hang of facial expressions. 

At least they looked content, and at least John was sleeping. She was still angry that John had broken protocol earlier. It hadn’t hurt, getting shoved back by the gust he’d called down. Not physically, anyway. John’s dodgy distrust of her, the refusal to let her help, that hurt more than breaking the one rule.

Jane sighed. There wasn’t much she could do now, she supposed, but make something for lunch. 

She kept the kitchen door propped open just enough to hear if either of the boys woke, and set to making up sandwiches. Cooking she could deal with, it was easy to let her mind drift away while her hands did the work. Baking was the best, she could run on automatic and bake for hours, but little meals were like a cup of coffee, a little pick-me-up. So she hummed to herself, portioning out three plates, covering two and placing them in the fridge, setting aside the third just to make sure neither of them had woken up. She peeked into the living room.

John was standing with his back to the kitchen door, head down. He wasn’t standing still but swaying gently, hands hanging loose at his sides. Jane paused, then edged the door open a little more.

She thought she could hear him mumbling… something. His voice was too low to make out from here, if it wasn’t just her imagination. His head, she noticed, every so often would shake side to side as if he was saying ‘no.’

“John?” 

The mumbling was still too soft to hear, but as she edged around behind him she could see his mouth moving. She reached out, but he jerked to the side, pacing to the other end of the room, head shaking. Jane pulled her hand back, fingers twitching for her fetch modus. She glanced to the couch - Dave was still sprawled there, fast asleep. John began to pace again, passing from the door to the stairs, head down. His mouth had stopped moving; the room was silent but for the sound of his footsteps.

Jane crept closer, bending a little to better see his face. He stopped pacing again, leaning instead with his shoulder pressed against the wall. Jane moved with slow, careful steps until she stood in front of him, then looked up to his face.

She could see his eyes were open, but blank. His face was impassive as if he was still asleep, but his eyes were open wide, glassy, sightless as doll eyes. She waved her hand in front of his face. He didn’t move. 

“John, are you sleepwalking?” She murmured, not so much needing an answer as needing to break the silence. His head sagged a little, swaying from side to side as it had before. Jane’s hand moved before her brain could catch it up.

She touched John’s face, and every lightbulb in the house shattered.

The Lifey Thing - as with all the ‘Things,’ - was funny sometimes. She knew her control over it was about as solid as trying to use your hands to divert water. You could guide some of it, but something would always leak, and always at the most inopportune times. 

Like now, for instance. She felt it bubble up in her hand, felt it pull, and then burst. It had never felt like that before, but then she’d never felt it get wrenched out of her like a sudden punch to the gut. There wasn’t any time to process the shattering lightbulbs, or the high-pitched whine of electronics reacting to a miniature Maid of Life Fireworks Show. She wouldn’t register Dave yelling in shock or falling off the couch until hours later, or the sharp sudden pain in the back of her head as if someone had stuck a needle into her brain. It happened, quickly, and when it was over, John pitched forward into her arms while Dave tried to make sense of the sudden shock.

She dragged John to the couch, setting him down, propping a throw pillow under his head.

“What the fuck just happened?” Dave asked, crouching next to her. He reached for John but she swatted his hand away. 

“I’m not sure, but don’t touch him for a minute.” 

John’s eyes were closed, now. When Jane pulled one open, it looked clear and normal. She sighed and sat back on her heels letting John’s eye close, resting her hand on his forehead.

It wasn’t a science, the Lifey thing. By the time the power had come to her, there wasn’t really time to learn how to use it very well, and no real need after the game had ended. But she could, if she concentrated, navigate along the streams of power that Life negotiated. To her, John felt ‘fine,’ maybe developing a light cold from being out in the wet, clearly over exhausted.There was damage from sleeplessness, but she could feel it dissipating, feeding off the energy that had been dragged out of her.

She pulled her hand away, then picked up the blanket - tossed aside in all the confusion - and tucked it around John once again.

“Jane?”

Dave was hovering behind her, peering over her shoulder. She gave him an apologetic smile and stood up, brushing her hands on her skirt for lack of anything better to do. 

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to spook you. I just,” she gestured at John, a little helplessly. “He was sleepwalking. I think the Lifey thing kind of… fixed it.”

Dave scooted around her, sitting on the couch next to John. He rummaged under the blanket, emerging with one of John’s hands clasped between his own. Jane blinked at him. “He’s okay, right?”

“Um, yeah, of course he’s okay, I just kind of de-insomnia’d him, I think.” There were dogs barking outside. When she stood back, she could hear glass crunching underneath her shoe. The lightbulbs - she wondered how far that surge had gone. She backed away from the couch to the door, pulling it open to check outside. 

There were a few people lingering on the sidewalk, some neighbors milling around the base of a streetlamp. She could see the bulb’s shattered glass glistening in the afternoon sun. 

“Fucking idiot,” she heard Dave mumbling, She glanced over her shoulder, and caught him brushing the hair back from John’s face. 

“Since when are you so publicly affectionate?” She asked. 

Dave flashed her a grin. “What, I can’t fret over my boyfriend?”

“Boyfriend?” Jane stared at him, and then laughed a little. That sure explained a lot. “Since when?”

“Couple days,” Dave left off fussing over John, instead reclining back against the opposite side of the couch, settling in as if he planned to keep vigil the rest of the day.

“Who else knows?”

Dave ticked the names off his fingers. “Karkat, Dirk, Rose, probably Kanaya. I don’t know if he told anyone.”

Jane lifted an eyebrow at him. “Terezi?”

He frowned at her, shook his head. “I’m not required to divulge information.”

“When did you break up?” Jane paused. “Again?”

“What the fuck is this, Sixty Minutes?”

“I’m just curious!” Jane huffed at him, crossing her arms. “I’m just worried this is a rebound thing, and that-”

“What the fuck is it with the two of you and rebounds? That’s not what this is, all right? I just don’t want to talk about the Terezi thing. Everything else is inconsequential.” 

Jane narrowed her eyes. Stubborn, but Striders were stubborn by definition. “I’m just worried about John, is all.”

“Yeah, so am I, considering you Lifey Thinged him into a coma. Look,” Dave leaned forward, peering at her over the tops of his shades. “I don’t want to talk about or to Terezi right now, okay? If you keep pushing me, not only will I have to talk to her, but I might just blab to Miss ‘I Get Off On Persecuting People For Minor Infractions’ about you blasting my sweetheart over here with a few million megawatts of Go The Fuck To Sleep.”

Jane bristled. “Blackmail isn’t nice, Dave,” she growled at him, but he had a point. She wouldn’t exactly look great in this situation, even less if Terezi found out about John blasting her earlier, which, knowing Terezi, she’d discover that little tidbit pretty quickly.

“It’s just fine if no one has to use it, Jane,” Dave replied, before pushing his shades back up his nose. “Seriously, I’m not mad about the lifey thing, John’s asleep so no harm, no foul. I don’t want to tattle on you.”

Jane wrinkled her nose, then raised her hands in defeat. “Fine, I won’t pry or anything.”

“Any more than you already have,” Dave grinned at her, flashing a thumbs up. “And I won’t be a jerk.”

“Any more than you already are,” Jane shot back, sticking out her tongue. Then she sighed, glancing around the room. The digital clocks were all blinking 12:00, and there was the problem of the lightbulbs still. “At least tap into some of that Knightly valor of yours and help me clean up.”

\--

5/5/14  
TBC

**Author's Note:**

> 7/8/13  
> Credit for this prompt goes to Shevathegun. Mad Props Yo to Thebes who keeps thing flowing smoothly.  
> Don't even try to tell me how to format pesterlogs on here I'm done with these futile attempts.


End file.
